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These are the three pillars on which Ed Notes is founded – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We are part of a tiny band of resisters. Nothing will change unless YOU GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Monday, January 7, 2013

Join MORE at Co-Location Hearings in Prep for Jan. 16 PEP

Want to get your dander up? I'm reposting all the stuff from the great
Inside Colocation blog about Success Academy outrages in just one of the
schools they occupy. Note the Citizens of the World co-loco hearing is Eva's husband's charter chain which will behave no differently.

Below is a list of hearings and MOREs are trying to get to as many as possible. If you have time come to one or at the very least join MORE at the Jan. 16 PEP meeting at Fashion Industries HS. If you get up to speak, just read some of the stuff below.

Date

District

Meeting type

Original school

Co-locating
school

Jan 8

District 4

Co-location

PS 38
232 E
103rd St, Manhattan

Harlem Prep Charter co-located with PS 38

Jan 9

District 15

Temporary Co-location

IS 136
and Sunset Park Preparatory
4004 4th Ave, Brooklyn

"New School 15KTBD" co-locating

Jan 10

District 17

Co-location

PS
221
791 Empire Boulevard, Brooklyn

Citizens of the World Charter co-located with
PS 221

Jan 16

PEP

6:00PM at

the High School of Fashion Industries located
at 225 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

*The High School for Environmental Studies, 850 10th Avenue , New York , NY (Consolidation of Independence High School with HS for Environmental Studies)

*Re-siting of Innovation Diploma Plus to Building M233, 601 W 183rd Street
, New York , NY ; IDP is being moved away from a site with four other
schools (145 W 84th Street). 601 W 183 currently hosts MS 346 Community Health Academy of the Heights, a grade 6 to 12 school.

The public school where I've been teaching for the last 8 years has been targeted for a "colocation" with a corporate-model charter school. Most people, including me, don't know what a colocation looks like, though we've heard bleak stories. I've started this blog to document it as best I can.

Success Academy has a “zero
noise tolerance” policy in their hallways, which they expect our
students and staff to honor. They requested that the playground be
locked after school hours so our students can’t play basketball and
handball, which they claim disrupts their teachers’ planning time.
Meanwhile, every day (weather permitting), Success Academy students
congregate in the courtyard you see here and sing and loudly play. Their
songs and shouts interrupt math and science classes in the many rooms
that overlook the courtyard. Our middle and high school students
regularly complain that it is extremely hard to focus with the noise
from outside.

The charter school recently
demanded a custodian to lock all of the basement exits after school.
Students from the upstairs public schools were still at events on campus
and to leave school they had to climb over a fence, causing an obvious
problem. For safety reasons, you can’t have exits locked. At the
building council meeting, Success Academy proposed to use the exits only
for emergencies. This proposal was voted down. However, they went ahead
and put up the signs you see above! And they continue to advocate for
our exits being locked.

The lights in the back are
the old fluorescents that most DOE schools were equipped with for years,
and are deemed unsafe for prolonged exposure. As each strip dies out,
it gets replaced with the new lights you see in the front. It’s typical
to see classrooms with a combination of old and new lights. The weekend
before school opened this September, the charter school laid out
$400,000 for a haz-mat team to install all new lights in their
classrooms. The lights installed in Success were all taken from storage
where they were scheduled to be installed in other schools over the
coming months.

AC update! When our high
school was located in the basement, each room had one to two working
ACs. We moved upstairs to rooms without ACs that were unbearably hot all
through September. While most of the second floor is not properly wired
for ACs, some rooms are wired and ready. So why weren’t our old ACs
simply moved upstairs? When the charter school’s contractors removed the
basement ACs, they let the units fall to the ground. Every AC but one
is broken! To replace all of the broken ACs will cost $100,000, and SA
is unwilling to pay up.

Success Academy, like our
school, has carpeting at its entrance. These carpets get vacuumed by our
custodial staff, who uses their equipment to clean all the schools
housed in the building. However, the industrial vacuum that custodial
uses is not functioning. SA purchased a new vacuum cleaner and a carpet
shampooer which our custodians must use to regularly clean Success’
carpet. However, despite custodial’s request, SA will not allow the
custodians to bring this vacuum upstairs. As a result, our school’s
carpets are being swept each day with a broom.

For weeks, several teachers
in Global Studies and International Studies have been unable to connect
to the internet. Two teachers said that the computer network repairman
came by to address the problem and discovered that wires had been cut in
the server room to make room for Success Academy, who needs to connect
on a different SSID than the rest of the schools, as the Department of
Education does not allow them to share the DOE internet connection. I
haven’t been able to verify this one way or another. Another teacher
pointed out that these holes were drilled through the gym to run Success
Academy’s internet wires into our building’s server, which they were
not supposed to connect to. The problems do seem to be resolved, but
only after a litany of complaints against S.A.

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UFT Election Vote Comparison: 2004-10

A Personal Historical Perspective

Why Karen Lewis Reads Ed Notes

"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

7 weeks Old - Nov. 2011

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Hedges says, There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history.

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

GEM's Julie Cavanagh Debates E4E member on NY1 on LIFO and Seniority

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy TysonProfessor of African American Studies and HistoryDuke University

A Familiar Voice on Unions

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike"- Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Outsource our children

Harlem $ucce$$ Academy Ad

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping by Norm Scott

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

Great Post on Teacher Quality at the Morton School

I'm very tired of the myth that schools are bursting at the seams with apathetic, unskilled, surly, child-hating losers who can't get jobs doing anything else. I recently figured that, counting high school and college where one encounters many teachers in the course of a year, I had well over 100 teachers in my lifetime, and I can only say that one or two truly had no place being in a classroom.